ERBC Through the Decades: the 1990s
Gary Lidholm followed a path that’s been traversed pretty commonly by many of Echo Ranch’s full-time staff members: he initially came to camp just to volunteer short-term, and came back again and again, but never thought that camping ministry would be a full-time occupation for him. In fact, when then-camp director Dean Diller approached him 1993 to ask him to consider taking the reins of the ministry, Gary declined, thinking that it was not the right time for him to leave his job with the U.S. Forest Service, seeing as he was too young to retire and had a lot of expenses to cover. Dean just smiled and said, “Don’t say no yet, because I’m still praying.”
Not long afterward, God gave Gary the push that he needed. The Forest Service let its Alaska employees know that it had to downsize its work force, but that any employees who had at least twenty-five years of service would be eligible for early retirement. Gary Lidholm was in year twenty-seven. And so, the next year, Gary and his wife Juanita found themselves in Kansas City undergoing training at Gospel Missionary Union’s headquarters to take on the leadership of Echo Ranch Bible Camp.
Gary Lidholm spent the rest of the 1990s as Echo Ranch’s director, and Juanita served as food service director. During Lidholm’s tenure, growth continued steadily throughout the camp, both in its facilities and its programming. More of the buildings and facilities that are still in use today were constructed, such as the mechanic shop and the staff house in Auke Bay, and work was devoted to increasing camp’s capacity for electrical generation as its power needs increased. A portable sawmill was purchased in 1997 and contributed a lot of lumber to this new construction. On the programming side, the summer camps continued to draw hundreds of campers each year, and opportunities like kayak camps were introduced. The camps also took on their current names during the 90s: Colt, Bronco, Maverick, and Senior High (it was figured that teenagers would probably just roll their eyes at any horse-related name for their camp).
Not for the first time, further growth in Echo Ranch’s facilities was prompted by fire. In 1998, the cabin that served as housing for winter caretakers was mostly destroyed by a fire, probably ignited by faulty wiring. This sudden, urgent need for caretaker housing gave camp’s staff and volunteers an opportunity to simultaneously meet another need, that for more staff housing as Echo Ranch’s team grew. And so, in 1999, longtime camp volunteer and speaker Tom Vesely designed the Lidholm Lodge – known informally today as the Green House – and volunteer teams arrived to begin work on it. The house was completed in 2000, and the next year began to house staff members during the summers and caretakers during the winters, as it still does today. For over two decades, the Lidholm Lodge has housed more staff and volunteers each year than any other building in camp besides the counselor dormitories.
Four past camp directors in front of Lidholm Lodge upon its “grand opening” in 2001 - (from left to right) Randy Beaverson, Gary Lidholm, Dean Diller, and Jake Hoffman.
Meanwhile, the Lord alone knows how many lives were changed by the Gospel at Echo Ranch throughout its fourth decade, as counselors and volunteers from across the country joined in to spend the summer pointing kids to Christ. But the decade of fruitful ministry concluded on a tragic note, particularly for the Lidholms. In May of 1999, Gary and Juanita’s newlywed son and daughter-in-law, Jason and Jessica, moved to Juneau to work for the summer. One weekend in August, they had flown up to Haines for a couple days, and were flying back home to Juneau on Sunday, riding with Glenn and Shirley Cave, who also spent many years volunteering with Echo Ranch, in their Cessna 185. On the way back, they made a stop at Echo Ranch to have dinner with Gary and Juanita, then the Caves and the junior Lidholms took off again to fly the rest of the way to town. By all accounts, the weather looked fine, and there was no cause for concern about the 15-minute flight. But for unknown reasons, the Cave’s Cessna didn’t make it back to Juneau; it crashed into a mountain on Douglas Island, killing all four passengers.
Echo Ranch and the community of Juneau reeled from the loss of these four close friends and fellow workers in ministry. Yet in the midst of the loss, the surviving family members of the crash victims had the hope that their loved ones were now at the Lord’s side, and that they would one day join them in eternal joy. Glenn and Shirley Cave’s daughter Christine remarked when recounting her memories of her parents: “It is fitting that a place that was so dear to our parent’s hearts – a place often referred to as ‘heaven on earth’ – was the place that offered our parents a final meal, a visit with friends, and a period of rest before they flew off to heaven.” Today, a memorial plaque sits by the airstrip dedicating it to Glen and Shirley Cave, and another plaque dedicates the staff kids’ playground to Jason and Jessica Lidholm.
The memorial plaques at ERBC that commemorate those killed in the August 8, 1999 plane crash.
Apart from leaving to attend a memorial service in Montana for their children, Gary and Juanita continued to lead Echo Ranch through their period of grief. But in 2000, it began to come clear to them that their time at the camp was drawing to a close. At the end of the 2000 season, they passed the torch on to Brad Burkholder to serve as interim program director, and they moved to Haines permanently, where Gary took on the pastorship of Port Chilkoot Bible Church. As the world turned the page to a new century and a new millennium, the Lidholms closed the chapter in their lives devoted to faithful service at Echo Ranch.
When writing a reflection on their time at ERBC in 2020, Juanita Lidholm opened with the statement, “God takes ordinary people and does extraordinary things in their lives,” and closed with, “God impacts us individually and in different ways but all for His glory.” As we’ve seen with each decade we’ve remembered, those insights have rung true at Echo Ranch over and over in every year of its history.